Post 4

Writing online can be very different than writing for print. Many articles and stories that are made for online reading are written to a slightly different set of rules than they would be if they were printed. Molly Snyder provided some tips on making impactful, lasting, and interesting online writing, most of which boil down to making your writing as concise and punchy as possible.
I read an article by MIAD graduate Brooke Steiner titled “When creative expression causes controversy.” The article was a good length-- not overly long or too short, and broken up well by relevant photographs. The paragraph sizes and simple language of the article fulfil Snyder’s first writing tip: make it “short and to-the-point.”
The second tip, “Write in the Active Voice” is also done; and example of it would be in the sentence “"The Unsung Hero" has received very mixed reviews due to the woman in the mural not having a head.” Writing in the active voice helps the readability of sentences like this one by giving a solid subject, verb, and object.
The third tip from Snyder is “Put the main info first.” The article fulfills this well by providing a clear opening overview of the article’s contents and message before expanding on it. The next tip, which advocates the use of subheads for particularly long articles in order to break it into more manageable sections, wasn’t used by the article. It wasn’t long enough to warrant subheads, and the photos did a good job of breaking up any longer parts.
The final tip for online writing was the use of hyperlinks to help connect your story to other writing and context that readers might find helpful or interesting. This article does use a hyperlink, which is nice as it helps provide information on a subject of the article without going into too much detail and derailing the story. More perhaps could have been put in, if there was opportunity, though.
This article follows the online writing suggestions pretty well, and comes out to be a compelling and interesting article. It uses the different features of online writing to its advantage, with snappy paragraphs and interesting images and add-ins.

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